Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. How to Argue for COVID Vaccination

COVID vaccines are coming. Many people don’t want them. In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan outlines a good argument that public health officials should try to spread:

For those who are afraid of injecting unnatural substances into their bodies, some pediatricians and advocacy campaigns are trying to sell vaccines as a way for the body to mount a “natural immune response” to an unnatural invader. “Basically, we flip the logic on its head,” says Matt Motta, a political-science professor at Oklahoma State University. “You know what else is a foreign substance that enters the body and can potentially do harm? Diseases themselves. And vaccines are the single best way to prevent these violations of bodily sanctity.”

If that argument flops, research also suggests there's value in "scaring people into doing it."

2. How to Talk About COVID Vaccination

One of the crowning achievements of 21st century science will be the COVID vaccine. It’s a breakthrough in nanomedicine. Richard Jones breaks down the science with elegant simplicity:

Here I want to discuss just one aspect of these new vaccines – how the mRNA molecule is delivered to the cells where we want it to go, and then caused to enter those cells, where it does its job of making the virus proteins that cause the chain of events leading to immunity. This relies on packaging the mRNA molecules inside nanoscale delivery devices. These packages protect the mRNA from the body’s defense mechanisms, carry it undamaged into the interior of a target cell through the cell’s protective membrane, and then open up to release the bare mRNA molecules to do their job. This isn’t the first application of this kind of nanomedicine in the clinic – but if the vaccine lives up to expectations, it will make unquestionably the biggest impact. In this sense, it marks the coming of age of nanomedicine.

3.  Many Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

It’s not just you. There are more films about mental illness. A team of academics plots the “financial and critical success” of movies about mental illness and finds that they win both awards and dollars:

4. All the (Bad) News That’s Fit to Print

If a drug saved 25 million lives, would it make headlines? Only if its success was overnight, argues Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. Consider CVD treatment. It’s a monumental public health achievement, but flashier news trumped slow, steady progress: 

The age-adjusted death rate per capita from heart disease has declined more than 70% since the 1950s, according to the National Institute of Health. So many Americans die of heart disease that cutting the fatality rate by 70% leads to a number of lives saved that is hard to comprehend. How is this not a bigger story? I’ll tell you why: because the improvement happened too slowly for anyone to notice. The average decline is 1.5% per year.

5. Google Goes Searching

A few years ago, Alphabet’s “Moonshot Factory” set out to use EEG scans to find a biomarker for depression. Instead, what they found was that people might not even want such a thing:

Our initial hypothesis was that clinicians might use a “brainwave test” as a diagnostic aid. However, this concept got a lukewarm reception. Mental health experts such as psychiatrists and clinical psychologists felt confident in their ability to diagnose via clinical interview. Primary care physicians thought an EEG test could be useful, but only if it was conducted by a medical assistant before their consultation with the patient. Counsellors and social workers don’t do diagnosis in their practice, so it was irrelevant to them. Some people with lived experience did not like the idea of being labelled as depressed by a machine.

But the researchers do point towards solutions that might bridge Big Tech moonshots and Real-World needs:

By contrast, there was a notably strong interest in using technology as a tool for ongoing monitoring — capturing changes in mental health state over time — to learn what happens between visits. Many clinicians asked if they could send the EEG system home so their patients and clients could repeat the test on their own. They were also very interested in EEG’s potential predictive qualities, e.g. predicting who is likely to get more depressed in future.